That’s right! You’ve seen us hint about it on social media, seen the announcement of the release date (September 3rd! Just over a week away!), but now it’s time to reveal the gorgeous cover and official blurb for The Skylark’s Sacrifice, book two in J.M. Frey’s YA action-adventure, steampunk-infused Skylark’s Saga.

This is a personal favorite of our Acquisitions & Editorial Director, and we think you’ll be equally stunned by the soaring conclusion to Robin’s tale. Get ready for more heart-pounding adventure, epic aerial stunts, and swoon-worthy, enemies-to-lovers romance, but first—treat yourself to this little visual:

Robin Arianhod is on the run. Trapped behind enemy lines, her only choice is to lose herself in the sprawling capital of Klonn. But hiding in the shadows is a disservice to the rocket pack she escaped with, and to the man she once considered foe. Instead, she’ll enact his plan, harness the incredible power of the pack, and stop the war from the inside.

Wanted posters stalk her every move as rumor fuels the Skylark’s rise, and her attempts at vigilantism attract the attention of more than just the city guards. Robin finds herself embroiled in the machinations of a mysterious underground rebellion—Klonnish citizens as tired of the war as she is.
 
But are they really her allies, or are they using the Skylark as bait? And can she really trust that her former archnemesis turned his coat? Or will the secret of his true identity lead Robin, and her newfound friends, to their deaths?

Rife with high-flying action, subterfuge, and deception, The Skylark’s Sacrifice is the explosive conclusion to the saga of war-torn Saskwya, and the one pilot who can change it all.

Isn’t that cover amazing? And guess what—you can pre-order your copy today!

The Skylark’s Sacrifice

Amazon Kindle Pre-Order // Goodreads

Still not convinced? Then how about a little free preview of the opening? And, in case you haven’t yet been introduced to Robin, the Coyote, and war-torn Saskwya and Klonn, be sure to pick up a copy of book one today. While Frey and the editorial team have done their best to ensure you’ll be quickly caught up on the details that transpired in book one, The Skylark’s Sacrifice is not a standalone title, and we do recommend that you read The Skylark’s Song first. Pick up your copy of book one at any of the convenient locations below.

The Skylark’s Song

Amazon // Barnes & Noble // Smashwords // REUTS Store // Goodreads

About the Author:

J.M. is an author, fanthropologist and professional smartypants. With an MA in Communications and Culture, she’s appeared in podcasts, documentaries, and on radio and television to discuss all things geeky through the lens of academia. She also has an addiction to scarves, Doctor Who, and tea, which may or may not all be related. Her life’s ambition is to have stepped foot on every continent (only 3 left!)

Her debut novel Triptych was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards,  won the San Francisco Book Festival award for SF/F, was nominated for a 2011 CBC Bookie, was named one of The Advocate’s Best Overlooked Books of 2011, and garnered both a starred reviewand a place among the Best Books of 2011 from Publishers Weekly.

Her sophomore novel, an epic-length feminist meta-fantasy titled The Untold Tale, (book one of the Accidental Turn Series), debuted December 2015, and was followed up by The Forgotten Tale in 2016 and The Silenced Tale in December 2017.  The Skylark’s Song, book one of The Skylark’s Saga, a steampunk action novel about a girl vigilante and her mysterious rocketpack, soared into book stores in 2018, and will be followed up by The Skylark’s Sacrifice in September 2019. The Skylark’s Saga was signed to a shopping agreement for an animation series in 2018, and her feature-length screenplay To A Stranger is currently in pre-production with a Toronto-based house.

She was the grateful recipient of a Toronto Arts Council Grant in 2018, and is currently working diligently to complete the granted project.

The post The Skylark’s Sacrifice // Cover Reveal appeared first on REUTS | Boutique Book Publisher |.

Today is also a special day because it’s COVER REVEAL DAY for THE ACCIDENTAL COLLECTION by J.M. Frey. THE ACCIDENTAL COLLECTION is, well, a collection of bonus content from The Accidental Turn series by J.M. Frey! There’s also an exclusive novella included!

Before we show you the cover, J.M. wrote a letter to you, her fans, and we’re sharing it here. It’s okay if you tear up a little, we did, too.

More than anything else, The Accidental Turn Series had been my love letter to the community within which I took my first stumbling, shaky steps as a writer – fandom. I found fandom in 1987 when my family gathered around the television to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation. I was hooked, and my parents got me the fan club magazine, and took me to my first convention in Drayton Ontario in the early 90s. When the Internet became a thing, I found not only fansites for every show I loved, but also stories! Not just the tie-in novels, which I had begun to spend all of my allowance on, but lots and lots of stories written by other people like me – fans who just loved something enough to turn that love into a creation to share with other fans. I wrote my first fanfic in 1991 for a little known Canadian children’s TV show called Dracula: the series, and from that moment, was hooked.  I was going to conventions every other month, making cosplays, and forming incredible friendships with my fellow fans.

I was always a storyteller – I was a child actor, and have parleyed that into a degree in theatre, some voice acting gigs, and my screenwriting. So it felt important to me to write a novel about the power of fandom, the joy and pitfalls of the community I loved, and the incredible things that fans can do when they band together and put their minds to it. To find now that my stories have fans of their own? That there is fan art, and fan fiction, and comics, and even cosplayers out there finding community and connection, and their own voice through my work? It’s stunning. It’s incredible. It’s humbling.

So thank you, thank you, thank you for being on this journey with me. Thank you for loving Forsyth, and Pip, and Kintyre, and Bevel as much as I do. Thank you for letting my words inspire your own. Thank you for your support, and for your reviews and blog posts, and for being here with me as this series finally reaches its conclusion.

I hope you love the last cover – and the magic is invokes – as much as I do.

And don’t forget, while The Accidental Turn Series may be ending, there is another series soaring over the horizon soon! Yes, my steampunk adventure-romance novel The Skylark’s Song, about a vigilante and her rocketpack trying to end a decade-long war by whatever means necessary, is touching down on September 4th 2018! Look for more announcements and keep up to date with what’s happening via my monthly newsletter.

BONUS! Do you remember Forsyth’s song for Alis from THE FORGOTTEN TALE? Now you can hear it! Click here, and get to experience it yourself!

One more thing…you can pre-order your copy of THE ACCIDENTAL COLLECTION!

Okay, now it’s time for the cover!

Isn’t it beautiful?

The post The Accidental Collection – Cover Reveal! appeared first on REUTS | Boutique Book Publisher |.

If you want to read along with us and avoid the SPOILERS that will follow, you can pick up your copy of The Untold Tale from major online retailers.

About the book

Forsyth Turn is not a hero. Lordling of Turn Hall and Lysse Chipping, yes. Spymaster for the king, certainly. But hero? That’s his older brother’s job, and Kintyre Turn is nothing if not legendary. However, when a raid on the kingdom’s worst criminal results in the rescue of a bafflingly blunt woman, oddly named and even more oddly mannered, Forsyth finds his quaint, sedentary life is turned on its head.

Dragged reluctantly into a quest he never expected, and fighting villains that even his brother has never managed to best, Forsyth is forced to confront his own self-shame and the demons that come with always being second-best. And, more than that, when he finally realizes where Lucy came from and why she’s here, he’ll be forced to question not only his place in the world, but the very meaning of his own existence.

Smartly crafted, The Untold Tale gives agency to the unlikeliest of heroes: the silenced, the marginalized, and the overlooked. It asks what it really means to be a fan when the worlds you love don’t resemble the world you live in, celebrates the power of the written word, challenges tropes, and shows us what happens when someone stands up and refuses to remain a secondary character in their own life.

Part One: “I assume the body is a corpse.” Chapters 1 and 2

Part Two: “Information, at last!” Chapters 3, 4, and 5

Part Three: “Your brother is a slimeball.” Chapters 6 and 7

Part Four: “It’s not cheating to know your enemy.” Chapters 8, 9, and 10

Part Five: “I’m allowed to want it.” Chapters 11 and 12

Part Six: “I wasn’t any help.” Chapters 13 and 14

Part Seven: “That’s the magic of being a fan.” Chapters 15 and 16

Part Eight: “Scars are scars; they don’t just vanish.” Chapters 17 and 18

Part Nine: “Fill it with good.” Chapters 19 and 20

Part 10: Chapters 21 and 22

Pip and Forsyth have been back in the “real” world for several months when Pip surprises Forsyth with a trip…to a fantasy convention a la WorldCon, where Elgar Reed–Forsyth’s Writer–is the guest of honor. What’s more, she’s arranged for a private dinner for Forsyth to meet his creator.

For our final post on The Untold Tale, we’ve interviewed author J.M. Frey.

Q#1: You’ve said that The Untold Tale is about the power of imagination, of the written word, and all of that is closely tied with the experience of being a fan, particularly when you’re not, shall we say, the fan the author had in mind. In that way, could it be said that The Untold Tale exorcised a lot of particular emotions for you?

Oh, heck yes! The very first scene I wrote of The Untold Tale was the section (now chapters four and five) where Pip yells at Kintyre and Bevel for being brutes in the middle of the dinner and dance sequence.  (Though back then the POV was Pip’s and Forsyth didn’t exist yet as a character).

I did this specifically because I was writing to exorcise a frustration I had after a conversation with a male friend about fantasy novel tropes. We had argued in circles and circles, and realizing that I wouldn’t win this argument, I stomped into my office, shut the door, and wrote a scene where a female aca-fan shouts at a fantasy hero for being the reason she wasn’t taken seriously as a fantasy fan.

When I reread the scene again, I realized that I had accidentally invented a few characters that I might like to return to, and set about trying to figure out if there was a narrative here, instead of just a rant.  So it was meant at first to be an exorcising exercise, but it did bloom into something more, which incidentally allowed me to address more than one frustration, and to do so within the context of a plot and a character’s journey.

Have those frustrations with the genre been completely purged since I wrote the book? Well, no. I mean, there are two more books coming!

On a serious note: the thing is, me writing about how frustrating, and annoying, and scary being a female fan can be has not magically changed the way women in genre fiction, comics, conventions, and cosplay are treated. It has brought the issues into light for people who might not have already been aware of them, and it might have made some readers more aware that they exist, but it has not made them disappear. And until women are not objectified in fiction in ways that make others treat their real-life counterparts as commodities, groped and raped at conventions, trolled and stalked and doxed and told to kill themselves on social media for daring to work in SF/F, as long as disgruntled men shoot up campuses and blame the girls who wouldn’t date him for it, then no – my frustration, and anger, and sorrow, and hurt will not be exorcised.

The writing has helped articulate my horror, and hopefully in the reading of the books, others will learn to recognize the harmful trends and tropes and move beyond them.

Q#2: Reading The Forgotten Tale, I’d never have guessed that The Untold Tale was meant to be a standalone. They flow so well. What gave you the idea for Pip and Forsyth’s second adventure?

The Untold Tale was always really only meant to be an extended character-study with plot.  I felt, when I had reached the end of the book, that Forsyth had reached the end of his evolution as a character, that there was nothing left to say. The Untold Tale was pitched around as a stand-alone. A few publishers expressed a wish to see a series out of the world, but they wanted The Tales of Kintyre Turn, not a fantasy series from the POV of Forsyth.

As the whole point of The Untold Tale was explicitly to write something that wasn’t The Tales of Kintyre Turn, I wasn’t interested in discussing it with my agent. (Though, I don’t think any of those discussions were serious offers in and of themselves.)

REUTS Publications was the first publisher to ask what happened after Pip and Forsyth slip their pages. They were the first ones to really express an interest in turning Forsyth’s story into a series. While I had batted around ideas about what I could do as follow-up short stories and novellas (Ghosts was written nearly immediately following The Untold Tale), I hadn’t considered an actual trilogy of novels.

So, the first thing I did when my agent made it clear that yes, I really did have to entertain their offer for a three book deal, was freak out, panic, pour a glass of wine, and contact as many of my nerdy book friends as I could to ask what it was that they loved and hated about second-in-the-series books.

I had a conversation nearly a decade ago with Doctor Who writer Robert Shearman, about what it was like to be asked to bring back the iconic villains featured in his episode Dalek. He told me that he didn’t want to do Daleks. He’d always thought they were kind of stupid, as far as baddies went. They were defeated by stairs, they had plungers that did nothing, their whisk-guns weren’t terrifying, they sounded squeaky and wobbled when they moved.

But his wife challenged him, he said, to take everything he disliked about the Daleks, and to make it terrifying. What if stairs didn’t hinder the Daleks any more? What if the plunger did something? Something horrible? What if the creature’s voice was the very thing that horrified the Doctor more than anything else?

So I asked my friends, what do you love about second books? What do you hate? What annoys you? And I compiled this list and I recalled this conversation with Rob and I thought: “Okay. How can I make these weaknesses strengths? How can I be true to the tropes and stereotypes of second novels, but do it in a way where I flip them, the way I did with book one?”

It also helped that a television producer had been interested in the book as a series at the time and had pleaded with me not to write a “mushy middle book” that they would have to struggle to turn into a second season that wouldn’t get the show cancelled. With that playful threat looming over my head, I knew that the story had to be meaningful, had to flow organically from the first book, refer back to the first book, and build on what I had already started there.

Q#3: What’s your favorite chapter in TFT?

I like all the bits ones with the songs and poems that I had to make up. I love culture-building in books. I not-so-secretly hope that someone will one day compose melodies for them so I can sing my own songs.

—

The Forgotten Tale is out now! Pick it up from these retailers:

Smashwords | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Forsyth Turn has finally become a hero—however reluctantly. But now that Lucy Piper has married him and they’ve started a family in her world, his adventuring days are behind him. Yet not all is as it should be. Beloved novels are disappearing at an alarming rate, not just from the minds of readers like Pip, but from bookshelves as well. Almost as if they had never been. Almost like magic.

Forsyth fears that it is his fault—that Pip’s childhood tales are vanishing because he, a book character, has escaped his pages. But when he and Pip are sucked back into The Tales of Kintyre Turn against their will, they realize that something much more deadly and dire is happening. The stories are vanishing from Forsyth’s world too. So Forsyth sets out on a desperate journey across Hain to discover how, and why, the stories are disappearing… before their own world vanishes forever.

In this clever follow-up to The Untold Tale, The Forgotten Tale questions what it means to create a legacy, and what we owe to those who come after us.

The post “Welcome to the madhouse, Syth.” The Untold Read-Along Part 10 appeared first on REUTS | Boutique Book Publisher |.

Guest post by Laurie McLean, Partner at Fuse Literary. Laurie represents the wonderful REUTS author, J.M. Frey.

When I first read The Untold Tale by J.M. Frey, I was amazed at both its audacity and its storytelling energy. The characters were like none I’d read about in an epic fantasy novel. The hero was the spymaster for the king masquerading as a fuddy-duddy second son whose older brother was a hero of legendary proportions. The heroine did not fit into preconceived notions of women in this fairy tale world. There was also something very mysterious about her background that we don’t find out about until mid-way through the book, so I won’t spoil it here.

Suffice to say that I loved this book and I set about trying to sell it to eager science fiction and fantasy editors in New York. I pitched the book and they all wanted to take a look. Months passed, as they do during the submission process. Then the rejections began to amass. It was too “meta.” The hero was not “alpha” enough. It was too long. It was non-standard. And the always popular and very general, “It’s not right for my list.”

I don’t know about all of you, but I am tired of reading the same old tropes in my sword and sorcery or quest fantasy novels. I search for new tales and new ways of telling them. I look for diversity in both characters and setting. I want the thrill of the adventure, but in a new way. That’s why I loved J.M. Frey’s The Untold Tale, as well as the second book which is launching in December 2016: The Forgotten Tale.

Frey strives for the diverse and unexpected in her books. This made it difficult for me to sell it to mainstream publishers who wanted more of the same that had sold so well in the past.

Frustrated beyond belief that I was unable to sell this series, I was giving a keynote at a writers conference in Seattle, and I mentioned that everyone’s path to publishing was different. I urged the hopeful writers in the room not to compare themselves to successful authors who had come before them (although everyone does), and I told the tale of my difficulties in selling a book of my heart.

Afterwards, as I was getting coffee (it was cold in Seattle that fall), two young women approached me and said that they appreciated my speech. They wanted to know more about the book I was having trouble selling. So we sat down and I waxed on and on about The Untold Tale and why I thought the quality of the writing and storytelling was superb, and how I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been able to sell it. One of them asked for my card, and as we exchanged information, she told me that she was an editor at a small-but-growing publisher in the Pacific Northwest called REUTS Publishing.

Bottom line: At that very conference, Kisa Whipkey asked to read The Untold Tale. She saw what I saw in that manuscript and bought not only book one, but all three books in the series plus several additional novellas, short stories and other bonus material in that world that would accompany the main event. Not only that, she also liked the second series J.M. Frey had shown me, about the first female pilot in a mechanized society reminiscent of World War I, The Skylark’s Song, and she eventually bought that as well.

The Forgotten Tale, the middle book in the series, is one of those rare breeds of middle books that actually carries its own weight. It is a rousing story in and of itself, and a worthy sequel to The Untold Tale. It deals with an apocalypse most of us readers would surely find horrific: the classic stories of our world are disappearing, and Forsyth Turn and his wife Pip must solve this mystery before all stories are erased forever. THE HORROR!

I hope I’ve intrigued you sufficiently that you’ll pick up a copy of The Untold Tale and its successor, The Forgotten Tale. J.M. Frey is just about done with the final book in the series, The Silenced Tale, and I am sure it will be equally enthralling.

‘Til then, I will remain a champion for all tales, comfortable and itchy, magical and harshly realistic, epically long or quickly consumed. To the bookshelves!

-Laurie McLean, Partner

Fuse Literary Agency

The post The Untold Tale…That Almost Went Untold appeared first on REUTS | Boutique Book Publisher |.

If you want to read along with us and avoid the SPOILERS that will follow, you can pick up your copy of The Untold Tale from major online retailers, or snag a free copy from StoryCartel.

About the book

Forsyth Turn is not a hero. Lordling of Turn Hall and Lysse Chipping, yes. Spymaster for the king, certainly. But hero? That’s his older brother’s job, and Kintyre Turn is nothing if not legendary. However, when a raid on the kingdom’s worst criminal results in the rescue of a bafflingly blunt woman, oddly named and even more oddly mannered, Forsyth finds his quaint, sedentary life is turned on its head.

Dragged reluctantly into a quest he never expected, and fighting villains that even his brother has never managed to best, Forsyth is forced to confront his own self-shame and the demons that come with always being second-best. And, more than that, when he finally realizes where Lucy came from and why she’s here, he’ll be forced to question not only his place in the world, but the very meaning of his own existence.

Smartly crafted, The Untold Tale gives agency to the unlikeliest of heroes: the silenced, the marginalized, and the overlooked. It asks what it really means to be a fan when the worlds you love don’t resemble the world you live in, celebrates the power of the written word, challenges tropes, and shows us what happens when someone stands up and refuses to remain a secondary character in their own life.

Part One: Chapters 1 and 2

In this section, we’re introduced to our narrator Forsyth Turn, lord of a rural fiefdom by day, King’s Shadow Hand by night, as he receives the unexpected delivery of a grievously injured person. That person turns out to be a victim of the evil Viceroy, the biggest bad in the kingdom of Hain, and his lackey Bootknife, whose preferred method of torture is carving designs into people’s backs.

But Lucy Piper, aka Pip, outlasted her captors, resisting their interrogation longer (and gaining a more elaborate scar) than anyone Forsyth has ever heard of. Between that and the fact that nothing about her points to any family or country he knows–and as the Shadow Hand, he knows just about everything–Forsyth finds himself engrossed by his impressive and mysterious guest.

Given the scant clues he is able to discern about Pip and the conditions of her imprisonment, Forsyth begins to consider that she may be more than human; that she is, in fact, a mythical Reader. Far from being an answer, this possibility only raises more questions.

“I am upstairs when I catch sight of the approaching cart.”

The opening line is in present tense, but it reminds me of a recollection anyway–someone remembering the moment everything in their life changed. And that’s exactly what this is for Forsyth Turn, the moment an unconscious Lucy Piper is brought to his manor.

The first pages of this book are excellent in so many ways, establishing expectations for the narrator (he assumes the body in the cart is a corpse–me too, man, me too) and for the story. Frey doesn’t give us the suspense of the raid during which Pip was rescued, she gives us the reflection that comes after, the care and the follow-through. She doesn’t give us the point of view of the guy who kicked down the Viceroy’s door and saw an unexpected prisoner; she gives us the man who quietly arranged and ordered simultaneous–and successful–sneak attacks on numerous enemy hideouts.

This first section of the book is primarily an introduction of Forsyth, our unusual narrator. He is intelligent, stable, composed; at least, when he’s going about his duties. As the master of his house, he efficiently handles the sudden appearance of a woman in great need of comfort and medical care. We can infer his similar competence as Shadow Hand by the fact that the men he trains and commands didn’t know they were going to find Pip on the raid and still managed to get her out alive, along with the books that were their target, without any loss of life or other catastrophe in the operation. And as a Lordling, it’s impossible to not be reminded of Mr. Darcy; we get the first hint of Forsyth’s goodness as a landlord in the discussion of the generous and improved usage of the Law Manor, both for his friend Sheriff Pointe specifically and the Chipping (the land under his protection) as a whole.

In all these instances, Forsyth seems sure of himself. But the moment the focus goes from his obligations, to his own self and happiness, he is uncomfortable at best and violently self-deprecating at worst. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen this in a male protagonist, if ever, and yet there are men in my own social circle and probably beyond who struggle with this same odd balance of competency and anxiety. His first instinct is to see the lack in himself, and he assumes that all but a select few see exactly what he sees: his uselessness and failings.

What seems to unify the areas in which Forsyth is confident is their distance from himself–the Shadow Hand is literally a “personality [he wears], a costume [he] conceived” (p 22), and the role of Lordling is one that he was obligated to take up due to the neglect of his elder brother Kintyre, the rightful lord.

Though Forsyth is a man who has seemingly resigned himself to loneliness, he is marvelously sensitive. The man has Feels; he’s crushing on Pip from the get go, clear to the reader long before Sheriff Pointe jokes about Forsyth courting her. He is sentimental and sincere in his tenderness and his obligations to protect her, though she is a stranger. The significance he attaches to Pip’s trust, the naivety with which he accepts it, is perhaps a tad over-the-top, but in that way it is an insight into Forsyth. It’s a sign of just how smitten he is that he’s not more suspicious of her.

Forsyth is a character who doesn’t know how great he is, and I have to admit, it’s nice to see that look on a male-identified character for once. I also enjoy the obviousness of the chemistry between him and Pip, as well as his total obliviousness to it–this is what great ships are made of, after all.

via Giphy

The Untold Tale has a slow start, action-wise, that’s true–chapters one and two, despite being more than fifty pages, are pretty much all about Pip’s early recovery and her and Forsyth getting to know each other a little. But the writing flows so well that the reading goes easily and quickly; it was almost hard to stop at page 53.

Coming Up

There’s a lot to look forward to in the next installment. Pip is an utter mystery, we’ve only just gotten teases of magic and mythology in this world, and big hero-man Kintyre Turn has been heavily talked up before the appearance we can expect soon.

Part two of the read-along will go live next Tuesday on C.M. Spivey’s blog, and cover pages 54-140 (chapters 3, 4, and 5).

The post “I assume the body is a corpse.”: The Untold Read-Along Part One appeared first on REUTS | Boutique Book Publisher |.